Keynote Speaker Ken Birman

Sixth IEEE Symposium on High Performance Distributed Computing

Making the Next Generation Internet Safe at Any Speed

The HPCC community has been
challenged to develop a next generation Internet
offering performance hundreds or thousands of times superior to
that of the current Internet and scalable to millions of end-points. This
performance would support life-critical and safety-critical applications
in health care, banking, air traffic control, national security, environmental
monitoring and disaster response, and will emerge as an infrastructure
in many military systems. But such applications demand much more
than speed: they also require predictably reliable and secure operation,
self-management, and guarantees of integrity even when perturbed by
transient failures or crashes of non-critical application components.
What does this tell us about the architecture of the network
and the properties it must provide?

Ken Birman is Professor of Computer Science at Cornell University
where he has studied distributed systems security and reliability issues
since 1981.
He founded a company, Isis Distributed Systems, that developed robust
software solutions for stock exchanges, air traffic control, and factory
automation; it currently operates as a division of Stratus Computer Inc.
Birman
is author of a recent book, "Building Secure and Reliable Network Applications",
(Prentice Hall and Manning Publishing Company; 1997), and has written
many articles on the subject, including one that appeared in
Scientific American in May, 1996. He currently heads the Horus and Ensemble
projects at Cornell.